Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Reveals the Thinking That Built a $4 Trillion Company

Well, I'm Steve Wozniak and I'm one of the co-founders of Apple. I was the engineer, often credited with starting the whole PC revolution. I knew that I was the best digital designer in the world long before Apple. So, I built a version of Pong. Didn't design my own game, just made my own Pong. 28 little $1 chips. Steve Jobs came into town from out of state. He took this one, ran down to Atari, and got a job with them. They might have thought he designed it or he largely designed it, but he didn't have that ability. I was in the homebrew computer club. I was too shy to speak, but I could if somebody asked technical questions, I could always answer. So, I'd set it up and I'd show people, you can type this in here and it had cause a bunch of things on the screen to happen. There was a crowd that would look over my shoulder. Now, Steve Jobs didn't know it existed. I wanted to help start this revolution. So, I passed out all my designs for free. So, Steve Jobs come and finding me in a basement. I took him to the club to see the interest. He saw all the people around me interested that my computer was so much different than the ones with switches and locks, the old mainframe style. And that's when he said, 'We should start a company.' My product, the Apple 2, was the only money Apple made for the first 10 years. There would not be a company without my product. That was it. That's what made the company. Just put me in a back room. I want to keep designing products for Apple. And Steve Jobs wanted to be very famous in the world from his early days. So he took over the role and presented himself to the press as the brain of all personal computers. Steve Jobs didn't want me around because I might be competition to him. So he had me move to a far off way down the hallway, a little office smaller than the little the building area we had. But he kept trying to come up with computers of his own. Here's what the world needs. And the Apple 3 failed, the Lisa failed, and the Macintosh was our hardest failure ever. Almost sunk the company. Startups create new types of business that didn't exist before. If you're really tight into it, it's the hardest work in your life. Hardest, but when you look back, it's the most fun you ever had in your life.

Well, I'm Steve Wozniak and I'm one of the co-founders of Apple. I was the engineer and often credited with starting the whole PC revolution, but you know my background I had this incredible background with an engineering father and he guided me into science fair projects, things that are outside of school and got me into electronics and I learned all the formulas and built devices at home and a lot of people do that but I got a ham radio license by 10 years old. I mean that you have to study all the formulas of how electrons flow through different materials. You have to study a lot of the ways ham radio works back then. You built your own radio. I had hundreds of parts connecting them together with a soldering iron to make a transmitter. Hundreds of parts to connect them together make a receiver. They all came as just kits. And I could go on and type on a telegraph key in Morse code. And so I knew I was going to be an electrical engineer. My father said, 'What do you want to be in life?' I said by sixth grade I said I want to be an electrical engineer first and second I want to be a fifth grade teacher like Miss Scrat that's a teacher for 10 year olds. That meant teaching education was a very high value to me by then largely came from my father but he would teach me how he would help me progress in my science fair projects through electronics and then I discovered digital. Nobody discovered digital. There were no books in a bookstore. There were no magazines about computer type stuff. It was just far off research military and you couldn't really get anything. And I found a journal by accident and it just turned my life around. And I said, I love adding these little ones and zeros the way computers do. I learned how to do it. And I love these logic gates that are like philosophical logic making decisions. And you can combine a few little small decision makers to make bigger decisions like adding numbers. And I made science fair projects that got me so much acclaim and awards and so I was well on my way but the thing is I would never be able to build a computer when I graduated high school I thought you know even if you go to a college like MIT or something you don't engineers don't build computers I thought that's for some weird computer people in research places and things but engineers just build radios and televisions I knew all the formulas for radio signals and how to build them and led me to some good pranks on occasion. And I loved combining the humor of knowing electronics when other people don't. You could always play little tricks with electronics and nobody not even teachers would know what was how it could have been done.

So humor was a huge part of my life and you know I don't know I knew that I was going to be a good engineer and I knew that someday I wanted to be a good teacher and humor and I knew that I'd always be into humor. So I didn't know I'd be able to speak. I was very shy, very shy from about 11 or 12 years old on and I had almost no friends and that helped. Why? It gave me a lot of time after school, sit down in my bedroom and start working on how would I build these things? How would I make a computer knowing very little about the lumber that was available, chips? I mean, I had to actually to even get information about computers from computer companies. How do you get a manual for a computer in, you know, 1970? How do you do it? Stanford Linear Accelerator was the top physics research place in the world then and the smartest people in the world don't lock doors and they had and so I would drive into Stanford on a Sunday and at least one door would be unlocked to the main building and I'd get up to their second floor. They had a library. This is technical stuff you couldn't find in a library that normal people went to and things about computers and I could send away to companies and get their manuals and everything. That was I mean basically it was rules rules are good guides and you should follow them you know cross the street at a corner but a little bit of pushing the system to get your to educate yourself is really worthwhile.

Notable pranks so many that it's hard to remember. I'd like to always think of one I pulled in high school where I got a you had to to get notices read to the entire school every day. The vice principal had to approve them, but I made one up and it said in a certain room at a certain time Stanford's head janitor would speak on higher custodial education and it got in. The kids would laugh and the teachers would say, 'Hey, no, don't laugh. That's really serious stuff. They make good money.' That was one. But I did pranks like making doors unopenable on occasion or telling people to wire their radios the wrong way. So, I kind of blew their radios up in electronics class and just anything I could think of. Did that all my life after that. Throughout my life, I've done a lot of pranks that took a lot of time, like weeks or a lot of money. And unusual. I like to do the unusual things people wouldn't expect. And the trouble is I've got a hundred I could list 100 pranks and every one I could say is my favorite today. So that just became part of my life. Humor. And I came up with a philosophy since I was kind of good at it. You should always have fun in everything you do. If you're working doing something productive, you should be able to joke with your friends that are your co-workers and always try to make fun and jokes and things like that. The trouble is not everybody does it. Some people might be humorous, but also some people might be great engineers, but not inventors. That's part of a personality that when you talk to people, you know if they're an inventor or not. You know if they're a prankster or not, you know it pretty early just talking to them. Getting a flavor for their personality. Your personality settles down somewhere between 18 and 23 years old. That's who you are. That's how you're going to treat life. It's how you're going to deal with things the rest of your life. You're not going to change. As much as you decide you want to try, you won't be able to. I was a psych major.

Bended the rules. I think every single prank you ever play trying just trying to trick somebody.

Well pranks are trying to do something very abnormal, okay, something unusual that you'll be able to laugh at and great designs are doing things to me or became doing things very unusual not the could be taught in books even not the way you had to figure out look at structure and really understand it. One of the great ones was my bluebox design which sort of famous one year of college and I figured out how to build this little blue box to make tones into an American phone could make calls to anywhere in the world. I called Sydney for Sydney dial a joke for free. The phone company had the flaws in it and they don't fix them fix security until it gets detected. Who thought you could put tones in the right tones into a phone? And that but the design the design certain chips with certain wires. I actually did probably the best job of my life of all my designs for cleverness, unusualness. And made it the fewest parts and the simplest little design, but there were some wires that went into some chips that have inputs and outputs. And everybody understands the inputs come in and that develops the outputs. and makes it work. So, I'd put in the right inputs and it would make the right tones. But those input, I knew how the chips were wired inside. I knew all their little parts inside, resistors, transistors, and how they work. And so, I actually knew that even where it's called an input, some electrons have to leak out to make it work. And I use those electrons that leaked out into a transistor arrangement that actually provided power to the chip. How does the chip do that without power? If you know how it's wired inside, you know what'll work. It's just the strangest thing in the world. Using an input as an output that turns on the chips and it just worked as beautiful. Save, you know, the absolute minimum parts.

All my designs, I got so good at designing things. A computer that came out and then I designed the computer over and over and I think is there any way I can save parts? always try to get the minimal parts, the most direct because another engineer would look at it and say, 'Oh, it's so understandable. There's very few pieces.' Normally, it would be, you know, most people would design things with at least twice as many pieces as I would. I sometimes, you know, for example, if you had to count from 1 to 60 for some reason, there are counters that come out and you put in the standard signals, it counts from 1 to 60, but then you have to detect when it hits 60 to restart it. That's a whole bunch more chips and comparisons are this equal that and that. I just did a different thing. I fed in on wires the number 60 and count it downwards. Or I would start with 256 the end point of the chips and I would count them upwards from 256 minus 60. When they hit the end they put out a little signal saying I'm at the end and you tell that signal reload the number that you're starting with. And these just it just like cut the numbers of chips on some cases down to half or a third. But I just did that in all my designs. And it was all in my head. I didn't have to think about it after a while. But here's something more important. I might do a tricky design and you think, 'Oh, you can repeat this trick that works so well.' No. The important thing was I knew how to create tricks on the fly. Every project was its own. It was not every project was not just another copy of something else. It was exactly its project. How do I make this one the simplest circuits, the fewest number of chips? Don't try to reuse something I had before. And I got so good at thinking out little ways around. For example, oh, I have to add a chip to get something and what's called an inverter that takes a plus in and puts a minus out or a minus in plus out. It reverses it. It's called an inverter. I have to add another chip. Then I'd say, but I have a spare little holding spot, a one bit of memory over here. And the memory has both a plus and a minus output and figure out a way to use it. And it solves the job. So I didn't have to even add a chip. I did an inverter with a part that wasn't designed to be an inverter. So very frequently my designs would involve, and this is before Apple, it would involve using chips for things they weren't intended. The manufacturers of the chips intended to do certain thing like counting. And I might discover a counter just puts out some signals. If you put a little twerp around, make it recount at some other some point. It would come out with some little signals that have timing that can operate dynamic RAMs in a in a computer. I don't know where this comes from. It could never be written in a book, but being able to find tricks on your own. It was just I I knew that I knew that I was the best digital designer in the world long before Apple. But because my my circuits would often be half as many chips as the manufacturer for a computer, I didn't ever build one. I couldn't afford a single chip, so I designed them on paper. But I knew I must be the best. But I never said I that I was the best because there can always be someone equal to you. Everything you've done, somebody else could have done the same things. Theoretically, they could be better, too. But my tricks were just never you couldn't write them in a book and they saved parts.

Well, really everything everything leading up to Apple was 10 years before Apple my whole life. But five years before that, I met Steve Jobs and I had got an executive to donate me some chips for free that I could never afford. and I built a computer of my own design and called it the cream soda computer. And that's when I got introduced to Steve Jobs. And when I first met him, he was young, 16 years old, so he didn't have any albums. And I took him my house and I showed him all the Bob Dylan albums. There were about five at that stage. And looking at the liner notes and the interviews with Bob Dylan and the lyrics to strange lyrics. How does a human being think of these words? It became a huge part of our life. So Steve and I together went off trying to track down Dylan memorabilia, going to concerts, the whole deal. That was a big part of our life. And this was Steve Jobs zero, the normal person. He could be a prankster, but he was really kind of just trying to be have nothing hippie, you know, just drink seeds and go barefoot or eat seeds, carry a bag of seeds and I admired that, but I wouldn't do it. But I had no friends. Steve understood my genius for designing computers and respected it. Oh my gosh, that's my best friend in the world. Somebody who actually knows who I am. I couldn't talk about computers with anyone at school. Nobody knew what they were, but he appreciated electronics and he could see my greatness. So, we became best best friends in my technical life and just talking about doing things and we did the blue boxes. He was always interested in what could make money. He from the day I met him he spoke of the important people in the world William Shakespeare Isaac Newton and how these people moved the world forward. So I knew that he wanted to be one of those people but he didn't have the academic background cuz we went to the same high school in different years and he didn't have my teachers and I had all the high up ones. So he was he was I guess low down academically but big deal and we were best friends. I drove him off to college in in Oregon and visited several times and just we play pranks. We play pranks on each other and pranks together. Just a normal laughing fun Steve, not at all like you know. And he got in with a whole bunch of other Harry Krishnas or whatever that wear the colored costumes and go around asking for money in airports or whatever or stealing incense from a store and then selling it back to the store. Those kind of things. I don't know what's in his book. I've never read it. I figured I was there so I don't have to read the books. Anyway, Steve Jobs and I are going along and I've got this idea. I'm always watching. Is there a way that I'm going to build the computer that I told for myself that I told my dad about? Out input output is so much more expensive than the processor. So much harder to do. And then one day I saw a pong in a bowling alley. And I said, 'Oh my gosh, a TV can be the output.' I was a skilled engineer. I was a skilled TV engineer. I could have I could have repaired TVs back in the days when you had TV repair shops. Oh my gosh, I knew how digitally to create the signals that would put balls and paddles onto a TV.

So I built a version of Pong. Didn't design my own game. Just made my own Pong. 28 little $1 chips. I always make things as small and inexpensive as possible. And two of the chips would put up a four-letter word when you missed the ball. So if you missed it, it might say heck or something. And then and Steve Jobs came into town from out of state. About once a year, he'd come in town, turn whatever I had into money, my latest invention. He took this one, ran down to Atari, and got a job with them. And they might have thought he designed it or he largely designed it but he didn't have that ability. So then I actually wound up through him. He worked a deal. Nolan Bushnell who ran Atari wanted a one-player Pong game called Breakout. And Steve described it to me. Could you do this? Oh, I'd love to build a game that young people will will want young people in their schooling age. That would be the most important people in my life to build a game that they would play and it would be mine. So I said, 'Yeah.' And he said, 'There's a hitch. You have to do it in four days.' Huh? Even I, the best designer in the world, can't I don't think I can do that in four days. I did not believe I could. Went four days and nights with no sleep doing it, designing it. Steve would go in, Steve would breadboard it up at Atari at night, but it was all my design. Then I'd find the problems, fix them, redo it, and so we designed Breakout for Atari. I designed Breakout. All my design and that was became a huge hit game. My design cleverness was such that Atari couldn't understand it. It wasn't normal. See, I don't design things the normal way and they didn't know how to test it. If they'd had me, I could have shown them exactly how. But I think they only knew Steve Jobs. I think they paid him and he paid me half of it supposedly. 12 years later, I found out in a book that he'd been paid a lot more than he told me. I would have said, 'You can have all the money. I don't need it. I got an engineering job.' And you know, I'm like that. He needed the money to buy into a commune up in Oregon, I believe. So, he's up in Oregon. Anyway, we're going on and I've solved output. An output device for a computer can be a TV because a TV is free. Why? I have a color TV in my in my compartment. I can take off the back of the TV, scope around with equipment, and figure out where the signals go in that make the TV show balls and paddles.

And then I was over at friend's house, John Draper known as Captain Crunch from the Bluebox days, phone freaker, one of the key free phone freakers. He was in a lobby doing some in a basement doing some engineering and he was on a computer. He said, 'I'm playing chess with a computer in Boston across the country.' And this is early '70s, 72 maybe 71, maybe even before that, 70, 73, 74, he's playing computer and he says there's this I found there's this thing called the ARPANET you could dial one free number at SRI Stanford Research Institute and it puts you on a network that your little output device teletype a teletype in those days would display six computers. There were only six computers on the whole ARPANET that is now today's internet. It was MIT and UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, University of Utah, a couple others. So here we are. I would have to build a device. If I saw something interesting in life, I went there. I went there and I had my design skills and I would go design it. I even had a reputation while working at Hewlett-Packard later on that I would design anything for people all over California. They'd come to me with incredible projects like the first hotel movie system in the world and I'd get to design it and I would charge them 5 cents. When you do something you love, that's how I was. I don't have to try to charge them an arm and a neck. So I had this device that I could type on. What I did was I rewrote I designed the circuitry that put letters on my TV set, words on my TV set, and I could type on a keyboard. The most expensive thing I ever had to buy all the way to Apple. The $60 keyboard in those days, like $600 today, just for a keyboard. I had to get the lowest level one didn't even have uppercase. Didn't have upper lower case. And I type on a keyboard and through a modem I built, it would send signals into my phone line to the ARPANET. And then I could make decisions and I could log on to any of these computers. I could log in as a guest and read files. And nobody did this. I'm doing something nobody knows about and I could run programs and things like that. And so that was sort of the input output phase.

I even had a reputation while working at Hewlett-Packard later on that I would design anything for people all over California. They'd come to me with incredible projects like the first hotel movie system in the world and I'd get to design it and I would charge them 5 cents. When you do something you love, that's how I was. I don't have to try to charge them an arm and a neck. So I had this device that I could type on. What I did was I rewrote I designed the circuitry that put letters on my TV set, words on my TV set, and I could type on a keyboard. The most expensive thing I ever had to buy all the way to Apple. The $60 keyboard in those days, like $600 today, just for a keyboard. I had to get the lowest level one didn't even have uppercase. Didn't have upper lower case. And I type on a keyboard and through a modem I built, it would send signals into my phone line to the ARPANET. And then I could make decisions and I could log on to any of these computers. I could log in as a guest and read files. And nobody did this. I'm doing something nobody knows about and I could run programs and things like that. And so that was sort of the input output phase. Now Steve was out of town after that. So he wasn't around and I went to a club. I had no idea what it was. My friend Alan Bound said, 'This is a club of people who want to build terminals and things like that.' I already had a terminal, a TV terminal that you could afford and build in your own house and talk to far away computers, timeshare computers or the ARPANET. And so I already had that and the first night of this club I found out that people were interested in these new upcoming microprocessors. Microprocessors had been around a couple of years, but two years before that I looked at a microprocessor and studied it. It could never build a computer that could do something useful. The computer that I told my dad I'd have someday couldn't be done with the Intel 404 4-bit microprocessor. But they'd gotten up this 8-bit one. And that night of the club, everybody was interested in a little computer called the Altair. It had switches to put in ones and zeros. And it had lights to display ones and zeros and buttons to put things in the memory. And that was the exact same as the cream soda computer I had built 5 years before. switches for ones and zeros, lights for ones and zeros. I had already built that. I was 5 years past that. I was working for a company, Hewlett-Packard, building calculators. You tuck, they were human. You press a five, see a five in the display. Humanness. And I also had my ARPANET terminal. First night of that club, I said, I wonder what these microprocessors what they're like nowadays, now they've grown up. And I took home a data sheet and I said, 'Oh my god, these are like the processors I used to design day and night in Certino every weekend sitting down designing them.' I said, 'This is the formula. I got a processor and that's the brains and I'll choose the right kind of memory. Everybody else was choosing the wrong type. They cost four times as much.' But I chose the hard what's called dynamic memory that required extra chips to get signals in because it forgets every bit it has every 2000th of a second. So you've got to get in somehow refresh every little bit on those chips. But they were 1/4 the cost. So I designed my well first of all I had I had the terminal already. I said instead of talking to a far away computer, let me put the computer on my board, my display and keyboard electronics and I and so I put the microprocessor on for the brains and the memory for memory and all of a sudden I could type things and I could run programs. I started writing a programming language.

I started writing a programming language. Bill Gates and Paul Allen had introduced basic computer language for the other types of computers. I chose a microprocessor that they didn't use because I had no money. I couldn't afford a $400 Intel microprocessor and Motorola I could get one for $40 being an HP employee, but I found one for $20 being sold over the counter at a show in San Francisco and I bought it 6502. It's become a very famous processor since then. And that was enough of a brains. I had the workings. So I'd take it down to the club. I was in the homebrew computer club and I was too shy to ever raise my hand and speak in the main meeting where we would speak up. But afterwards you could go down show things on a table and to other people. And I was too shy to speak, but I could if somebody asked technical questions I could always answer. So I'd set it up and I'd show people you can type this in here and it had cause a bunch of things on the screen to happen. Eventually, it was all in color and fanciful, but at first it was just text and there was a crowd that would look over my shoulder. Now, Steve Jobs didn't know it existed. I wanted to help start this revolution. So, I passed out all my designs for free, open-source, public domain, no copyright notices to people in the club so they could build this thing. For $300, you'd have a useful computer instead of spending 400 on an Altair and with switches and lights and having something not useful for anything. You'd have to spend buy two cars worth of money to just to get a teletype. So this was everybody was looking at this and unlike the movie with Ashton Kutcher show Steve Jobs coming finding me in a basement and taking me to a club. What? He'd never been to the club. I'd been there since the first day it started. I took him to the club to see the interest. He saw all the people around me interested that my computer was so much different than the ones with switches and lights, the old mainframe style. And that's when he said we should start a company. And he'd been coming up with ways to sell my stuff for five years, but starting a company, I had one fear. I loved Hewlett-Packard where I worked. I believed in it so much. They believed in engineers. You could be engineers all the way to the bottom. And I was going to be an engineer. Never move up an org chart. I don't like politics. Never move an org chart. Engineer all my life at Hewlett-Packard. I told everyone that. I said, 'I won't risk my job.' So I proposed it to Hewlett-Packard. They turned me down for the first of five times for the personal computer. No big computer companies thought it was going to amount to anything. And they had reasons. There are reasons, but all the things personal computers came to do. After a year, they didn't couldn't see that it was going to happen. So, Steve Jobs and I had to start a company. Now, for one year, we kind of got known for the Apple one computer. Built very few of them, which they're so rare. They sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars now. The Apple one computer, at first the idea, Steve Jobs's idea to start a company, we had no money. We have no savings accounts, nothing. What do you do? His idea was, well, we'll sell our most valuable things and we'll pay somebody to design a PC board. It's a green board that has a lot of connecting wires. Then you plug your chips in and it works. And we'll build a board for $20 and we'll sell them for 40. No parts on them. Everybody else can get their own parts somewhere, you know, their companies. And shortly after that, the owner of the local store had seen me operated at the club and he wanted to buy a hundred for $500 each. That's $50,000. That was such a huge number. My salary, Hewlett-Packard, was $25,000. We're going to have a $50,000 order. I made sure Hewlett-Packard sent my idea around to every one of their divisions and a vice president signed it off. They weren't interested because I wouldn't do it behind my company's back that I worked for. I was that loyal. And so we actually we had to borrow $5,000 from a friend and then we would get all the rest of the parts on credit. That means they come out of a closet. The company that makes our PC boards, they come out of a closet and all these employees would be stuff them into the board and solder them in, wave solder them in. So, we got boards that were completely built with all the parts and we got it for $250 and we were going to sell it to the local store, the Byte Shop. Paul Terrell had the vision. We're going to sell it to him for $500 each and there were no lawyer steps or anything in between. We had 30 days credit to pay for the parts once they came out of the closet. And we'd cycle things and get them delivered in 10 days for cash on delivery. That's what Paul Terrell at the Byte Shop did for us. And so we wouldn't lose money these Apple ones. But before we ever delivered an Apple 1, I tried to get the first one to go to a woman that would take them into schools and teach young fourth graders, fourth, fifth, sixth graders, that's 9 to 11 years old. She would teach them 9 to 12 years old. Teach them how computers are sets of programs. They're made by people. They aren't smart on their own. They just have rules they follow. and teach them how to use computers. And I wanted to give her the first Apple 1. Eliza Lo was her name. She still has it. And Steve Jobs just wouldn't do it. I talked to him for two hours driving back from her city in Cotati, California, where she told us what she does. And I couldn't talk him into it. So he made me buy it for $300. I bought the first Apple 1, gave it to Eliza Lo. Just what I believed in my heart was the right place for a computer. Anyway, we knew that these Apple ones were going to be short-term and weren't going to sell many of them because I'd come up with the most amazing thing ever from a little idea that popped in my head. That was the Apple 2 computer.

That was the Apple 2 computer. When I was back at Atari designing Breakout, four days of nights, no sleep. I thought, wouldn't it be neat if someday these arcade games were color? They weren't. What if they were color? And then I started thinking as a color television engineer, what sort of signals went on a wire? plus and minus plus and minus sine waves. I said, 'What if I took the ones and zeros out of a computer and put them on a wire?' Well, one is plus, zero is minus, and I put them on the right speed. I knew how televisions were designed. It violated the rules of the mathematics of color television, mathematics of things like sine waves and formulas. But it was really easy for zero dollars. Instead of spending $5,000 on the parts that could manipulate blue, green, and reds on a color TV, here it was. You just take a number out of a computer, put it on the wire into the TV, and every TV would think it was color, although it violated all the math rules. Oh my gosh, I knew that would work. That's why our first logo from Apple was six colors. Nobody could ever expected color to come to these small computers or color to come to arcade games yet. The Apple 2 computer, which we knew we showed off before we even delivered an Apple 1. The Apple 2 computer was the first time ever arcade games were color, but it was more important. It was the first time ever arcade games were software. You could sit down a 9-year-old in a program called BASIC, it's so simple, could write a decent game in one day. Whereas before that, the games were hardware, the ones I designed, like Atari even. And you got hundreds of chips and thousands of wires. And a skilled engineer knows what's on those wires designs things so that they show up on a TV doing the right things. And that would take sometimes a man-year to design a new game prototype you thought of. So, that was a huge that meant games could be done by a 9-year-old in one night. This Apple 2 was going to shock the world. And it was so good. We knew we'd sell a thousand a month, but we couldn't afford to build a thousand a month. We had no money. So, that's when Steve Jobs started looking around at other companies that might buy in, Commodore and Atari. Atari was too busy with the upcoming home Pong game they had. and Commodore decided now we're that people don't want a nice fancy computer. Very few parts. I designed it totally the best W systems I ever did to shrink parts of the timing and shrink parts of the memory and shrink everything down and the slot assignments. An operating system that just came with the computer, not on a disc, didn't have to be read in as a program. It was in there. It was just incredible. But Commodore said, 'People don't want that. They just want a simple cheap one.' and they had a marketing guy that wanted to do theirs. Their head of engineering quit. He came to Apple not long after that and he said our product was the right one. He wanted to be with us. So he came in, joined us and he started running European Apple, your Apple. And I love designing the European version because the televisions are different over there. And I did PAL ones too. I did an Arabic one where the words go from right to left and you have to add extra characters at the end of a word if it had a certain ending letter. Oh, I love those. I just love those product. I did them. People walk in the door. Wasn't even like they don't go to the top of Apple. They just walk in my door and can you do this? Yeah. We were that small at the start. No bad publicity. All the publicity in the world for these little startups with two people. Two young kids starting up and here's what they have. It was taking over the world because there were no competitors. None of the big computer companies thought it was going anywhere. So, they weren't out there trying to put out their own messages or even do the same things we were doing. So, we had it kind of easy. And anyway, the Apple 2 was so big, how will we raise the money? And we had a venture capitalist. He said, 'How many you going to sell?' I said, 'A million.' He says, 'How do you figure that?' I said, 'Well, there's a million ham radio operators and this is bigger than ham radio.' Nobody could deny it, but it wasn't business talk. It wasn't the sort of marketing talk they wanted to hear. So, the venture capitalist kind of turned us down, but he did introduce us to Mike Markkula who is still alive. He became our third most important partner. He invested the money to build a thousand of them. And he was the adult in the room. He explained to Steve Jobs and I who you hire in a tech company and what the responsibilities would be and their roles and introduced us to a couple people to interview and here's what a president does and you'll need some attorneys and you'll need operations people to build it. So he was guiding the show and he was in house. He had an office right in with us. He was I think president. I don't think we even had CEO word then. And Mike Markkula really is the one that formulated the company, told us how to be professional to hire people that were professional at what they did and knew their job and where you're doing an introduction your computer, you wear suits, that sort of stuff. But he gave us a lot of good guidance to doing things the right way.

When I was back at Atari designing Breakout, four days of nights, no sleep. I thought, wouldn't it be neat if someday these arcade games were color? They weren't. What if they were color? And then I started thinking as a color television engineer, what sort of signals went on a wire? plus and minus plus and minus sine waves. I said, 'What if I took the ones and zeros out of a computer and put them on a wire?' Well, one is plus, zero is minus, and I put them on the right speed. I knew how televisions were designed. It violated the rules of the mathematics of color television, mathematics of things like sine waves and formulas. But it was really easy for zero dollars. Instead of spending $5,000 on the parts that could manipulate blue, green, and reds on a color TV, here it was. You just take a number out of a computer, put it on the wire into the TV, and every TV would think it was color, although it violated all the math rules. Oh my gosh, I knew that would work. That's why our first logo from Apple was six colors. Nobody could ever expected color to come to these small computers or color to come to arcade games yet. The Apple 2 computer, which we knew we showed off before we even delivered an Apple 1. The Apple 2 computer was the first time ever arcade games were color, but it was more important. It was the first time ever arcade games were software. You could sit down a 9-year-old in a program called BASIC, it's so simple, could write a decent game in one day. Whereas before that, the games were hardware, the ones I designed, like Atari even. And you got hundreds of chips and thousands of wires. And a skilled engineer knows what's on those wires designs things so that they show up on a TV doing the right things. And that would take sometimes a man-year to design a new game prototype you thought of. So, that was a huge that meant games could be done by a 9-year-old in one night. This Apple 2 was going to shock the world. And it was so good. We knew we'd sell a thousand a month, but we couldn't afford to build a thousand a month. We had no money. So, that's when Steve Jobs started looking around at other companies that might buy in, Commodore and Atari. Atari was too busy with the upcoming home Pong game they had. and Commodore decided now we're that people don't want a nice fancy computer. Very few parts. I designed it totally the best W systems I ever did to shrink parts of the timing and shrink parts of the memory and shrink everything down and the slot assignments. An operating system that just came with the computer, not on a disc, didn't have to be read in as a program. It was in there. It was just incredible. But Commodore said, 'People don't want that. They just want a simple cheap one.' and they had a marketing guy that wanted to do theirs. Their head of engineering quit. He came to Apple not long after that and he said our product was the right one. He wanted to be with us. So he came in, joined us and he started running European Apple, your Apple. And I love designing the European version because the televisions are different over there. And I did PAL ones too. I did an Arabic one where the words go from right to left and you have to add extra characters at the end of a word if it had a certain ending letter. Oh, I love those. I just love those product. I did them. People walk in the door. Wasn't even like they don't go to the top of Apple. They just walk in my door and can you do this? Yeah. We were that small at the start. No bad publicity. All the publicity in the world for these little startups with two people. Two young kids starting up and here's what they have. It was taking over the world because there were no competitors. None of the big computer companies thought it was going anywhere. So, they weren't out there trying to put out their own messages or even do the same things we were doing. So, we had it kind of easy. And anyway, the Apple 2 was so big, how will we raise the money? And we had a venture capitalist. He said, 'How many you going to sell?' I said, 'A million.' He says, 'How do you figure that?' I said, 'Well, there's a million ham radio operators and this is bigger than ham radio.' Nobody could deny it, but it wasn't business talk. It wasn't the sort of marketing talk they wanted to hear. So, the venture capitalist kind of turned us down, but he did introduce us to Mike Markkula who is still alive. He became our third most important partner. He invested the money to build a thousand of them. And he was the adult in the room. He explained to Steve Jobs and I who you hire in a tech company and what the responsibilities would be and their roles and introduced us to a couple people to interview and here's what a president does and you'll need some attorneys and you'll need operations people to build it. So he was guiding the show and he was in house. He had an office right in with us. He was I think president. I don't think we even had CEO word then. And Mike Markkula really is the one that formulated the company, told us how to be professional to hire people that were professional at what they did and knew their job and where you're doing an introduction your computer, you wear suits, that sort of stuff. But he gave us a lot of good guidance to doing things the right way. Steve Jobs and I were different. I had built this whole computer. It was all mine. Nobody helped me coming up with the ideas for it or anything. And like I said, I was shy. I didn't want to talk to press or anything. Just put me in a back room. I want to keep designing products for Apple. And Steve Jobs wanted to be very famous in the world from his early days. So he took over the role and present himself to the press as the brain of all personal computers, this upcoming market where you could own your own computer. And he presented himself that way constantly. But he kept trying to come up with computers of his own. Here's what the world needs. And the Apple 3 failed, the Lisa failed. Apple 3 failed because of marketing. The Apple 3 Lisa failed because he didn't Steve didn't know computer hardware software. Didn't know what the price would be. It would cost that much. And the Macintosh was our hardest failure ever. Almost sunk the company. Built a factory to build 80,000 a month and we were selling 500 a month. Our stock dropped so fast and we had to save the company.

Steve Jobs and I were different. I had built this whole computer. It was all mine. Nobody helped me coming up with the ideas for it or anything. And like I said, I was shy. I didn't want to talk to press or anything. Just put me in a back room. I want to keep designing products for Apple. And Steve Jobs wanted to be very famous in the world from his early days. So he took over the role and present himself to the press as the brain of all personal computers, this upcoming market where you could own your own computer. And he presented himself that way constantly. But he kept trying to come up with computers of his own. Here's what the world needs. And the Apple 3 failed, the Lisa failed. Apple 3 failed because of marketing. The Apple 3 Lisa failed because he didn't Steve didn't know computer hardware software. Didn't know what the price would be. It would cost that much. And the Macintosh was our hardest failure ever. Almost sunk the company. Built a factory to build 80,000 a month and we were selling 500 a month. Our stock dropped so fast and we had to save the company. But anyway, the Apple 2 at first, okay, it's selling a little bit. It's a little game machine. People are starting to learn. you can buy this computer and make games on it. Not no big-time money. Not yet. Like millions. And then after a year, two things happened. Up until then, your programs were on cassette tapes. If you wanted a program to manage your checkbook, you grabbed a cassette tape called Checkbook, put it in a cassette player, you played it, the tones would go into the computer, and the computer would have the program. Kind of shaky. It wasn't very reliable, but after a year, went to a staff meeting and Apple was going to be allowed into the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'd always wanted to see Las Vegas. You hear about it in movies. Oh my gosh. But Apple was only going to send three people. Mike Markkula, who was marketing, Steve Jobs, who was Steve Jobs, and Jean Carter was our sales guy. Only three marketing people. And I'm too shy to say, 'I'm a founder. I want to go to Las Vegas. I want to see it.' So I raised my hand at the staff meeting. I said, 'What if we have a floppy drive, a disc drive?' I had never worked with any disc hardware or software in my life. you know, I just knew how to look at any problem and find solutions. And Mike Markkula said yes.

Steve Jobs and I were different. I had built this whole computer. It was all mine. Nobody helped me coming up with the ideas for it or anything. And like I said, I was shy. I didn't want to talk to press or anything. Just put me in a back room. I want to keep designing products for Apple. And Steve Jobs wanted to be very famous in the world from his early days. So he took over the role and present himself to the press as the brain of all personal computers, this upcoming market where you could own your own computer. And he presented himself that way constantly. But he kept trying to come up with computers of his own. Here's what the world needs. And the Apple 3 failed, the Lisa failed. Apple 3 failed because of marketing. The Apple 3 Lisa failed because he didn't Steve didn't know computer hardware software. Didn't know what the price would be. It would cost that much. And the Macintosh was our hardest failure ever. Almost sunk the company. Built a factory to build 80,000 a month and we were selling 500 a month. Our stock dropped so fast and we had to save the company. But anyway, the Apple 2 at first, okay, it's selling a little bit. It's a little game machine. People are starting to learn. you can buy this computer and make games on it. Not no big-time money. Not yet. Like millions. And then after a year, two things happened. Up until then, your programs were on cassette tapes. If you wanted a program to manage your checkbook, you grabbed a cassette tape called Checkbook, put it in a cassette player, you played it, the tones would go into the computer, and the computer would have the program. Kind of shaky. It wasn't very reliable, but after a year, went to a staff meeting and Apple was going to be allowed into the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'd always wanted to see Las Vegas. You hear about it in movies. Oh my gosh. But Apple was only going to send three people. Mike Markkula, who was marketing, Steve Jobs, who was Steve Jobs, and Jean Carter was our sales guy. Only three marketing people. And I'm too shy to say, 'I'm a founder. I want to go to Las Vegas. I want to see it.' So I raised my hand at the staff meeting. I said, 'What if we have a floppy drive, a disc drive?' I had never worked with any disc hardware or software in my life. you know, I just knew how to look at any problem and find solutions. And Mike Markkula said yes.

But anyway, the Apple 2 at first, okay, it's selling a little bit. It's a little game machine. People are starting to learn. you can buy this computer and make games on it. Not no big-time money. Not yet. Like millions. And then after a year, two things happened. Up until then, your programs were on cassette tapes. If you wanted a program to manage your checkbook, you grabbed a cassette tape called Checkbook, put it in a cassette player, you played it, the tones would go into the computer, and the computer would have the program. Kind of shaky. It wasn't very reliable, but after a year, went to a staff meeting and Apple was going to be allowed into the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'd always wanted to see Las Vegas. You hear about it in movies. Oh my gosh. But Apple was only going to send three people. Mike Markkula, who was marketing, Steve Jobs, who was Steve Jobs, and Jean Carter was our sales guy. Only three marketing people. And I'm too shy to say, 'I'm a founder. I want to go to Las Vegas. I want to see it.' So I raised my hand at the staff meeting. I said, 'What if we have a floppy drive, a disc drive?' I had never worked with any disc hardware or software in my life. you know, I just knew how to look at any problem and find solutions. And Mike Markkula said yes.

I'm thinking if I can develop an entire floppy disc connector, a board called the interface to a floppy disc where you can type run checkbook or run color math or other things like that. If I can do that in two weeks, they'll have to take me to the show. I'll be the only one that knows how the floppy disc works. And that's exactly how when I worked every single day and night, Christmas, New Year's, all through waiting for the Consumer Electronic Show. Got down there the night of the show. I had a high school programmer named Randy Wigington helping me. We got a room, the two of us, in some little dinky motel off on the side of things. And we'd walk all down the strip in Las Vegas, go to the convention center, finished up the code by 6:00 in the morning. Then I copied it onto the wrong disc onto the new one. The blank disc onto the new one and had to redo it, but it was all in my head by then. So I got it redone in the morning and Randy and I that was so much fun. Talk about pranks again. I mean I carried my tools with me. Don't worry about time. And I carried my tools with me. So I take apart a telephone in those days. You could switch all the numbers on the touchtone phone around. So instead of one, two, three horizontally, I made one, two, three vertically. and I put it back together in that format. So everybody wonder why is it not working? Also they had a movie in your hotel room. I had designed the first system like that. I said they have to in this little box here they have to have your room number encoded. Took the box apart because I had my tools. Changed the little dip switch inside. We never got build for the movies. But um and Randy was he was a high school kid, but I taught him how to play craps and he won 35 bucks. Too young for a casino, but he did it.

You remember things like that? I do remember that we did somehow introduce the floppy disc. That was a huge change, but the bigger change came at the same time. It wasn't from us. PCs sat there linguishing for where are they going to be used for? How are they going to be worth their money? And the first useful program came out, software. The first spreadsheet program came out could only run on the Apple 2. It was called Visicalc and it made the cost of the computer totally worthwhile. Businessmen would go into a store see on work work on a computer for an hour or two setting up on the spreadsheet months January, February, March, April, May setting up all the in the expense areas and income areas. They'd make a little change in January and see the results in December. They just had to buy an Apple 2 and more memory to hold a bigger spreadsheet and a bigger display card and Visicalc the software. And that really changed the whole world. From then on, we were going to be one of the hugely successful companies of all time. And the market, the personal computer market was firmly established because managers could go into their big companies like IBM and one manager could just type his own numbers in to a spreadsheet and do all the arrangements and get it done quickly. Whereas before that you had to apply to a department. I want these records from all of our business transactions and you'd wait for, you know, a few days and you'd get a print out and you say, 'Oh, no. I want it a little different to change it.' No, having your personal computer really made things change even for big business.

Oh, when we started Apple.

But no, we were still best friends forever right to his death. I mean, never ever I just have a thing. I don't I never had an enemy in my life. I only be good to people because my shyness taught me to want to be liked by everyone. No conflict. Don't want to ever get in conflicts and arguments. Never did that with Steve Jobs despite some movies kind of trying to make a deal of it. So he wanted to be big businessman well known in the world for my product and I just wanted to be an unknown engineer working on more and more clever things, floppy discs and all those different countries and making the disc software faster or slower. I just wanted to keep doing that printer interfaces that were great. And all my interfaces were real tiny, very few parts. So, you know, and they and Steve Jobs didn't want me around because I might be competition to him. So he had me move to a far off way down the hallway, a little office smaller than the little the building area we had. So I could do my stuff all there, which I liked anyway, you know, and I was working on operating systems and better basics. But if it took two weeks, he got nervous and he'd hire somebody else to do it. So, anyway, so you know, he was just he was in a part of the world that I deliberately didn't want to be.

Now, when Apple went public, that was another thing. We had our IPO and all of a sudden, three of us had our names on paper as founders with founder stock and we were worth infinite money forever. Just that much money. It was unbelievable. I had never sought money. I started this company. I didn't want to start a business. I didn't want to start an industry. I didn't want to make money. I wanted other engineers to see my clever work, to look over and say, 'How did he where was his brain?' I wanted them to respect my brain. And now I had all this money. I hadn't really saw it. And this nice thing, okay, I could buy a home. But um there was I thought, you know what, what about these other people that were so early in the home computer club even? Would I have been as great if they weren't praising me? So, I gave huge amounts of my stock, tens of millions of dollars worth to five early people. And then I gave I sold a whole ton of stock to the employees of the company at a preIPO price and they all basically got a house out of the deal. But I did it because they're all working for the same company. What? Why should three of us have infinite, so much more wealth than we'd ever want? And then I started donating to a lot of museums in the city of my birth, San Jose, California. And I built a lot of those things up and the city honored me with a street named after me. And these are the things I'm never ever go back and change to have money. Never. I'm so glad of who I am of all the people in the world. And I've stayed true. I've never sold out. And I've stayed true to my beliefs.

Okay. Uh the first time it's called separating. I had a plane crash in 1981. I was the pilot and I had a type of amnesia called forward amnesia. I'm not forming memories. I can have talk with you, but if I come back in 10 minutes, I have no memory of it. They weren't formed into permanent memories. The doctors didn't spot this in me. hospital. My parents, relatives, they didn't spot this. Nobody knew. And yet, it's fairly common for car crashes and airplane crashes. Nobody spotted it. They just thought I was weird. For five weeks, I didn't know that I'd put a dog in a kennel for five weeks. I'd never do that. Or that I was missing a tooth. I didn't know I was missing a tooth for five weeks. And one day, I remember going down to the Macintosh group. I guess my wife at the time took me there. And I was talking to a friend Andy Herzfeld and he said something about the plane crash. He referred to a plane crash and I said, 'Ah, I'm in the plane crash dream.' And in a dream, you're allowed to turn around and walk any direction you want. I was about to turn around on him and walk the other way. I said, 'No, I'll play by the rules of this dream.' And had some small conversation. I can never remember it now. But that night in bed with my fiance, I asked, 'Did I have a plane crash or was it a dream?' I joke a lot about everything and everybody that knows that I can be very off track. She said, 'It's a dream. You're having a dream.' She thought that I was teasing that I didn't know whether I had a crash. I didn't know. I'm trying to figure it out. Did I have a crash? I could remember every detail of the day right up to reaching for the throttle in my plane. I can't remember pushing it. There's a reason your memory when you have a crash like that, your memory drops out about 30 seconds before because it hasn't lingered long enough to become permanent. And I couldn't find anything. I felt my body. Do I have any signs of a plane crash? And then I went back and I said, 'Wait a minute. When you're flying a plane, small plane, you never forget a landing.' I was going to land in Santa Catalina that day. I never landed in Santa Catalina. And I jerked up and I knew that I'd had a plane crash. And all of a sudden, half of my mind was forming memories. Half wasn't. And I could tell the difference. And I could tell where I'd been. I was so amazed that a mind could work like that. And then my parents or somebody set me up to see a psychologist the next day. I guess they'd set it up already. I didn't know. I went down. I told him what had happened that I wasn't forming memories. Now I am. And he said, 'That's because you're manic depressive.' I said, 'What? I don't have these big high and low states. I'm real even keel. That's how I brought myself up in life.' And he said, 'Yeah, that's because it starts when you're 30.' I was 30. What a quack.

So anyway, I called Steve Jobs up right away after I came out of amnesia. I called him up in a day or two and I said, 'This is my last chance to go back to college for my fourth year.' See, I only had three years of college. I was a good student, but I could go back and get my degree. And I said the Macintosh group which I was on is in good shape. They're creative people and I love them all. And so that was and Steve said fine. So I didn't leave Apple as far as employees or paycheck. You know I still got a paycheck because I still things would come up that I would participate in Apple events or go to clubs around the country or the world that invited me. I one time they invited me to be a keynote speaker at Christmas in New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand. So I went because I just love speaking to clubs because they're my people. Those are my people. And Apple never was involved, never paid for a cent of this. Never knew that I was doing this around mostly around the country. And so I was being paid and I went back to Berkeley and had a year had my last year of college there. I went back as a psychology major, taking all the majors for psychology students because I wanted to study the brain more after having gone through that study memory. And it got over and by the time it was over, I'd had this idea to put on a huge Woodstock style concert, which I did.

Southern California sets the theme for today's big concerts in this country. Showed that it was there was a market for it. I lost a lot of money and we had to spend like maybe maybe 50 million of today's dollars just to groom the amphitheater, right? Maybe even more. It was a huge undertaking, but it was successfully liked. It was liked even though it lost me money. And it was very important to do things first. And there were a lot of firsts at that concert. A lot of first including the first space bridge with the USSR. USSR and United States were in a cold war. Cold war as bad as could be. And we had the first concert ever in the United States with a big video display. We made contact with people in Moscow, television people. NBC from the United States was going to go over for the 1980 Olympics in Moscow or 82 Olympics and they got cancelled because Russia invaded Afghanistan. They didn't get cancelled, we canceled, but our equipment was over there to make satellite connections to broadcast the Olympics. We hooked up with their TV people and our TV people. We worked phone companies get permission for a phone call to set things up and when it came on the screen it worked. We did the first three. I did them myself. the first three space bridges with the Soviet Union. And of course when I announced what was going on when it came on our screen, Bill Graham was supposed to go up and announce it in a microphone. Bill Graham the rock promoter and he didn't. I ran across the stage and he's looking at some displays coming from Russia and he says, 'Steve, this is coming from Southern California.' I knew the truth. So I went up the microphone, announced it. There was a lot of booing. You know, Soviet Union was like al-Qaeda or something. Just horrible in those days. But it was a start. It was before perestroika. Eventually I would put on the first concert in Russia in Moscow in a stadium with top Soviet groups and top US groups. But by then it was in perestroika and the very first one they did an hour TV show on Showtime about it and that was Russia doing things with Russia to get us closer and closer to peace. I believed in talking on the space bridges person to person. all of a sudden you realize how similar you are and the propaganda of the governments just dissolves. So I worked on personal diplomacy efforts, put a lot of money and efforts and computers into it. And eventually one year I spent the money, all the money to send 340 low-level Russians. I insisted they not be like principles in schools. They'd be teachers. Send low-level Russians to the United States for two weeks traveling and visiting homes of Rotary Club members. And I spent the whole thing. I mean this was important to me to try to seek peace everywhere in the world and I forget where what we were started with.

Well, first of all, no matter if other people kind of tell you like teachers, you get a low grade or something. Oh, I'll tell you. You got to start when you're young. And the problem is if you're already several grades along, years along in school and you kind of haven't been too well in the class. Maybe you're in the middle. The best thing in the world to find if you can find somebody who would go back and work things from the start. Mathematics is that way. I had to do that once with my own son who was the brightest math kid in one of his schools in the next school. He was the only one from his prior school to get into calculus. If you don't get into no calculus, algebra, you don't get into algebra in sixth grade, the formats in the United States are you, excuse me, if you don't get into algebra in sixth grade, the path you go on doesn't get you up to the AP courses, which gives you five points for an A instead of four points for an A, you can't possibly get there through high school. So, it kind of turns you easy. And the teacher said he was getting an F. He wasn't doing any work or anything. said maybe if he did something came through a little bit he could get a D. Huh? My son, he'd been the most brilliant one in math and with everyone around him and best programmer on computers in my computer classes. So I talked to him and told him how important it was and then a week later I asked him, 'You've been studying yet?' No, he's not doing it. So we came with Christmas break for two weeks and I got the same book from the school for myself as Jesse had. and he was he liked this game Magic the Gathering that had started. It was in its early days and so I bought some Magic the Gathering decks and we'd play Magic the Gathering together at the table and then we would read both of us not to each other. We'd read half a chapter and then there were some questions halfway through the chapter and we'd answer them privately and then we always compared. We always had the same answers. We had 100% through the entire book as it turns out. After a half chapter, we'd play Magic the Gathering for, you know, 20 minutes or 30 minutes. Then we would go through the second half of the chapter and answer the questions at the end ourselves independently on paper and compare and always 100%. And then they had a program you could write at the end of each chapter. And his class didn't do the programming. Teacher said it's designed for ninth graders, not sixth graders. Oh, he wrote every single program, too, that was at the end of the chapters and went through one all from the very start of algebra all the way through and he's getting 100% on every set of questions. He had to go back to school. The vacation ended back to school one chapter behind his class and they had a quiz and he got an A minus. And then the next week he got the highest score. He's up with his class. got the highest score on all the tests from then on and he wound up at the end of middle school, 8th grade, he got the math award of the whole school. It was a turnaround, but it was believing in, you know, sometimes it takes very sometimes you have to go back. Schools don't have a way built in to go back. You almost need a private instructor to go back and take you through if you want to do well. Also, if you feel you love something in life, and it might be you discovered chemistry or you discovered algebra, you want to be really good at it, you don't have to do just what they say. So, like when I was in school, I would they would assign all the odd problems up to from 1 to 37. Do the odd problems at the end of a chapter. I loved math so much. I would do every single problem all the way up to 50. Odds and evens, every single one of them. I just sometimes if you really love something and boy that's so I got the math awards in my schools doing that and that helps education almost always if the more you have the better but you'll find a lot of success stories like Steve Jobs that didn't have really great education and still made it.

So it's not the only thing you've got to think for yourself and you've got to try to come up with ideas of what you're good at. If you're slightly good at anything, might be carpentry. It might be chemistry. You like it, you value what you're good at. So, um, you know, don't just take what they tell you. Here's what you have to study this chapter in a book. Feel free to go online, get more information, go to a library, get books in the old days, and learn as much as you want. You could, this is an exciting thing. And the other people don't have to do what you're doing. I was lucky. I was shy. But the shyness said, 'I don't have to do what everyone else is doing because then I'm competing with them directly. I could do all my computer design, teaching myself electronics, building my own projects out of school on my own. Doesn't matter if it's not going anywhere.' A lot of people would say, 'Ah, you're this not going to take you very far. This what you're interested in isn't going to be worth much money. You should be a dentist or a lawyer or something.' And don't I just say, 'No, don't listen to that. Don't listen to that. If you like it, go with it. Feel your heart. You got to follow your heart. So many occasions in my own life, I found following your heart led to very good things. You know, that's what you feel you should do. And don't believe other people saying you're doing bad. I remember when we were starting with personal computers and I designed the Apple one being told, well, if you had to pay yourself salaries for the hours you spent on this and that, you'd be losing money. And who cares? We're doing what we want to do. We feel it's got some meaning to us. Yeah. Also be very honest. Don't try to say something because the words sound good to others. You got to be honest with yourself. Say something just totally the truth that you believe in. And sure it might be a little weak on a subject, you know, of how certain chemicals combine or something like that or some physics how planets go. You might have your own idea. You say it what you believe. somebody else that has more knowledge could come along and say, 'No, look at this. Here's how things really are more completely' and I don't believe in what you know, say it honestly. It'll show to other people that you're not trying to impress them and make up words. I'm just really against that people that oh, I want to make things up sound good. Even if you're raising money for a startup and keep in mind, you might someday have your own company. you might actually get a lot from it. Even wealth, you know, and startups are the greatest thing you can ever do in the world, even for your country's economics, how much money is going on in the economy. Startups create new types of business that didn't exist before, new categories, and it's like additional new wealth and not just substitute just a new version of the old wealth. And that's why it's so important. Startup is the hardest thing in your life. When you're in a startup, you're thinking, 'Oh my gosh, I could actually achieve something. I could do this.' And you have a vision where it could go and it's going to go somewhere good. But you work so hard. You work day and night. If you're really tight into it, it's the hardest work in your life. Hardest. Really hard. And you feel it. But when you look back, it's the most fun you ever had in your life. You're doing something for the sake of it. and don't force everything to have a price tag. Do some things that you feel like for free. Also, if you're doing something that you're good at, maybe heading towards a company, but you have some friends and they aren't they don't quite know as much as you. They're not quite as smart or they're younger, help them. Do everything you can to help them come up the ladder of learning and being with you and don't try to shove them down. Be a good person.

That's yeah I just also here's another thing you might be good at some particular thing maybe it's mathematics maybe it's engineering maybe it's building things you can be good at your own things but to have a company a little startup someday you're going to have to have other people around you contributing their parts to make it work and respect the other disciplines your discipline might be mathematics and engineering another person's discipline might be business, running the business to make money. Another person might have a discipline of marketing, knowing what is worth how much money and what features should be. Respect them all. Listen to them all. Don't think you're the only one. And you'll go a lot further. And always be well-liked. How far you go in any business, my dad told me this when I was very young, how far you go is largely based on how well-liked you are. And I decided I was shy, so I had it lucky. But don't ever get into arguments with people. will offend them. I'd be afraid to have to talk to people in that way back then. And so yeah, just don't offend anybody. Be nice and say the best things you can about everyone.

The secret of turning thoughts into reality. Everybody has thoughts, especially if you're thinking about like what products would make your life better. Everything you have, you stumble on something. Ah, I can make this a little make it turn left instead of right. It'd be more convenient, be more natural. Everybody has ideas. How do you turn them into reality? It's not going to be an academic education. It's going to be in experience and actually being a builder. There are a lot of people out there that are builders and they get ideas. They hook little parts together or things together, maybe in the garage, maybe some woodwork or metal pieces, and they make something for themselves. And every once in a while, you know, you can't guarantee you're going to stumble on a winner idea, but every once in a while, whoa, this really worked out well. And then you start showing it to other people and get a claim for it. So, you know, the building part's the hard one. I like when I'm doing a lot of interviews where I go, I always respect the audio people and the video people so much because they're doing what I did with Apple. I wasn't just a somebody had great ideas for what a computer could be that were advanced in the world. I wasn't just the engineer that could design how to build them on paper and tech test them and all that. I was the builder. I hooked up every wire, every chip to make these things that I could take down to a club and show off that became the Apple one and Apple 2 computers and other projects. I was a builder. So, I look at the people doing the actual work deserve just so much credibility from me. They're so important. I'm so glad I feel better about myself for having actually done what's considered technician work, maybe a lower paid status of work than engineering, but that's...

If I could say something to Steve, I would just say how good a friend he was and how wonderful we never argued. And near his death, I told him, 'You aren't judged by what you don't do after you die. You're judged by what you did when you die. And you were the greatest tech leader ever. And you changed and improved my life so much.' And I go back, I don't think Steve Jobs wanted Apple or Chief Jobs 2 when he returned. I go back to Steve Chief Jobs Zero and his voice and how he talked and did things back then and just fun two fun kids. I go back that far, too.